Chapter 3 Women’s Bodies

The body, despite it’s apparent “naturalness”, is not a purely biological entity: it’s meaning and significance are shaped by differing cultural ideas

Ways in which women’s bodies are culturally constructed?

Women’s bodies are pierces, scarred, corseted, crippled, deformed

Mind/body dualism, what problems does this dualism create for women?

-The concept states that women has been associated with the body and the men with the mind

-She is naturally the temptress and seductress

Is there any one definition that distinguishes all men from all women?

-Hormones (?)

-Sex

Why do the ‘theory of the gaze’ and the ‘resistant gaze’ provide powerful feminist tools?

-Theory of gaze is a powerful tool for understanding how comodification of the female body in film reproduces powered gendered relations and how women are positioned in western culture to participate in their own objectification

Example and meaning of the reproductive politics of the body, of how women’s reproduction is ‘mediated’ by technology and culture.

Technology = fertility enhanced by drugs

o Eggs removed from one female into another

Culture = Only one child per family (China)

Why are debates over reproductive policies so contested and divisive for women?